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Nature’s Secret Codes: The Rivers Hidden Beneath Our Streets
Meet the regions undoing decades of riparian harm and returning nature to its rightful place.
To the casual person walking around the city, there may be nothing especially remarkable about Wyman Dell Park in a corner of northern Baltimore.
That is, until you notice that this little park is actually sitting some 20 or 30 feet below street level.
If curious visitors pick up on that hint, and spend time walking around the park, they will notice the sound of water gushing below some of the storm sewers in and around the area (as well as on the grounds of the adjacent art museum).
There is even a little corner of the park that has reverted into a mini marsh. “This tiny little bit of the habitat of the stream,” Baltimore-based artist Bruce Willen tells me, “has returned to the park naturally, despite people’s best intentions to engineer it away.”
Turns out, there was here, where there now is manicured grass, pavement and a vibrant residential area.
“It’s soggy and there are all these marsh plants and pollinators”, continues Willen. He adds, “when you’re down in [the park], it’s a little bit easier to have this mental shift or imaginative jump where you’re like ‘oh wow, I can picture the stream valley and this creek running through here’.”
Willen’s passion project, called Ghost Rivers, now documents the trajectory of the stream that used to run through Wyman Dell.
“It wasn’t until I started working on this project and looking at these old maps that I had this kind of aha moment,” he recounts, of the first time he realized there were hidden secrets beneath his neighbourhood green space.
“I was like ‘oh wow, this is part of the original stream valley, this depression in the landscape here.”
Now, with an interpretive walk featuring 12 points along the buried river, visitors to the Ghost Rivers exhibition can map the course of Sumwalt Run and peer through cutout signs that literally capture the channel the river used to carve.
Ghost Rivers, Willen says, “started off with me wanting to memorialize this lost waterway, this ghost stream,” he tells me over a recent Zoom call. “Because it is, really, completely buried. It has literally been erased from the map, and I wanted to bring it back to people’s attention.”
His aim is to help city dwellers learn about the many hidden codes of the natural world, and reflect upon a vast network of hidden hydrology literally beneath their feet–or their cars.
Another river, , a tributary of Baltimore’s main river, Jones Falls, is buried for about a mile-and-a-half under an expressway in downtown Baltimore. Though parts of it literally see the light of day, as in the image below.
And this isn’t only a story about Baltimore — far from it.
The secret codes of the natural world
In every major city around the world, there were — and still are — dozens if not hundreds of hidden streams running under the highways, buildings and parking lots.
Here is dedicated to Toronto’s lost rivers.
The burying of these streams was no accident. The waterways were seen as incongruous with development. They got buried not just to make way for the built environment but also to manage stormwater runoff and sewage.
Uncovering the watery veins of cities motivates Jason King, a landscape architect living in Portland, Oregon, too.
Thirty years of working in this field have imparted upon him a keen sense of the “natural drainage pattern that existed before” and the need to respect the ground that was there before humans decided they wanted parking lots or even manicured lawns superimposed upon it.
His site, , documents the underground network of rivers in cities from , England to , British Columbia.
Even now, it is the surprise factor that stream sleuths like King find rewarding. He might be walking down a street and, he tells me, “I go around the corner and the creek daylights in a four block section and flows in the front yards of all these houses in the middle of this neighbourhood and goes back in the pipe.”
The most surprising ones are sewers that are gushing with (clean) water and it has not rained a day in months. “Then you realize there is this subtle valley that you have been following that you would not even perceive unless you’re clued into it.”
The power of water
Few other natural forces on Earth have the power to move and shape landscapes the way that water does. One look at the Grand Canyon, and it becomes abundantly clear that water is a force to be reckoned with.
For centuries, though, humans have tried to control the flow of water. There are huge dams on massive rivers to harness electricity. Entire networks of underground tunnels are built to move water that has nowhere else to go in our mostly paved-over cities. There is a network of rivers and streams that has been buried to move our waste.
To understand how rivers and streams have shaped our world, and especially our cities, I posed a provocative question to professor Luna Khirfan: what does it say about our relationship to nature that we take a natural body of water and degrade it to be part of the sewer network? To literally treat the natural world as a toilet?
Khirfan is an expert in regional and urban planning at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Her work focuses on how urban planning clashes with the natural world and how to change that.
“We need a paradigm shift,” she told me, to “stop treating ecosystems as our toilet, or our garbage dump, and start to learn from our Indigenous communities, to work with nature and respect it and prioritize it rather than superimposing buildings on it.”
Baltimore is not the most obvious place for this work to be happening with gusto. The city gets a bad rap from old headlines referring to it as the murder capital of the United States. But Maryland’s biggest city is making huge strides to fold the natural environment back into the built up one. And it’s far from alone.
‘Stage Zero’ river restoration
Conservationists in some parts of the world are turning to the tools of modern development — the same big rigs and giant trucks that destroyed the natural world in the first place — to bring rivers and ecosystems back to their former selves.
Consider in rural England.
Because rivers weren’t only buried beneath city streets in the 19th and early 20th century — they were redirected from fields and farmland, too.
“It’s happened over hundreds, if not thousands of years,” says Ben Eardley, a senior project manager with the National Trust, a British charity. “It’s just our use of the landscape, really, that modifies the landscape.”
So, his organization began work to re-wild a river in a corner of southwestern England near Somerset. Eardley and the team at the National Trust drew on the expertise of a group of researchers in Oregon who had developed a technique called “Stage Zero” to restore rivers and floodplains.
The results speak for themselves:
The area he and his team were working in had been altered from hundreds of years of sheep and cattle grazing, plowing and other forms of agriculture. Trees had been chopped down, biomass had been removed from the landscape — all this, Eardley tells me, “changes how that river system works.”
“Now you’ve got this much more static state of affairs,” says Eardley, “you’ve got this [river] channel and there’s no biomass in it, or very little around it that affects it, so in terms of those physical processes, it’s been massively simplified.”
The idea with the Stage Zero reset, then, was to reverse engineer the landscape back to its previous, messy, unaltered self.
But getting the green light from the British government to do the work was not exactly an easy process. “There was an awful lot of consenting and permitting that we needed to get to the point of actually getting boots on the ground and doing it,” Eardley says.
The other big challenge was more novel.
The Somerset river reset, in essence, is an earth moving project. But, Eardley says, “because the contractors you use when you’re moving that much earth, they tend to be guys that are used to building car parks and roads.”
“So they’re thinking in very straight lines and what you’re trying to avoid on that site are straight lines and what are obviously man-made features and flatness.”
In other words: they needed road builders to unbuild a road.
“You want it all chaotic and undulating and dynamic so it was quite hard to work with them to avoid those hard edges. That was a key learning.”
Dominating nature?
Back in Baltimore, Willen tells me, the city was ahead of its time when it came to building a separate network for rain runoff and sewage (most cities combined the two, a costly mistake that many cities are now correcting).
This was still the era, he says, of “man with a capital M conquering nature” and many small rivers and streams did not stand a chance in the face of that mentality.
The thinking at the time — and still even today, to some extent, Willen laments — is that we can solve all these ‘problems’ of too much or too little water through engineering and modern technology.
“We imagine that technology allows us to separate ourselves from the natural systems we are part of,” he says.
How else do pristine river valleys get converted to underground toilets?
From river ecosystem resets to ‘green infrastructure’ projects in cities, the benefits of turning the built environment over to nature — in essence, creating natural ‘sponge cities’ (or regions)–are clear.
These include creating natural places for the water go to (because concrete and asphalt aren’t exactly receptive to water absorption), providing habitat for animals, beautifying the neighbourhood, reducing air/noise pollution, etc.
Nature, it turns out, has a way of springing back, if only humans give it the space.
You know,” Willen tells me, “water is still going to do what water wants to do. There’s only so much you can control it.”
